Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #915: New World Order with Matt Place

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

I sit down with Designer Matt Place to talk about the creation of New World Order, something he and I created many years ago to tackle a big problem the game was having.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work at home edition. So as I explained in a previous podcast, we are now hybrid in the office half the week and at home half the week. And so all my solo podcasts will be, I think, be in the car. But I like to do interviews and I can't do interviews in the car. It's hard to do interviews in the car. But I'm going to continue to do interviews at my house. So today, I have Matt Place to join us. Hey, Mark. Okay, so I've had people on to talk about sets we've done together. In fact, Matt and I have talked about sets we've done together.

But today, we're going to talk about something a little larger. Talking about a concept that Matt and I were sort of the co-parents of, I guess. That's right, yeah. So we're going to talk about New World Order, which is something that Matt and I sort of created and has become... Anyway, we're going to talk all about what New World Order is, how we came up with it, and what it means to magic. So, Matt, why don't you begin?

I've told the story, but you've never told the story. So why don't you go back to the very beginning? What is your version of how New World Order began? So first of all, you have a better memory than me, Mark. So you'll probably add a lot to this. But the big impetus, what was happening at the time, this is what, 2008, 2009 space, working on Alara was the set we were currently focused on.

And fresh in our minds was some of the quote-unquote mistakes that we had made during the time spiral block right and just how complex and how too much text and just confusing uh cards that weren't adding value weren't adding fun and depth to the game and so we said hey let's let's kind of do a reset here let's look at that and uh figure out how do we what's a good philosophy to share with ourselves to convince ourselves of and to share with the rest of the team going forward to make hopefully magic just as fun as it is without those pitfalls without you know people being like hey i'm not with this car that has two mechanics i've never seen before and they're introduced in this

set thinking future site uh and confusing people in a way that doesn't have upside, right? And one of the big pieces to this is adding complexity often does add depth. But can you add depth without adding complexity? It's a harder job, but it's worth doing. And that was really the push that we were... Okay, so before we get into what it is, I want to expand a little bit on, make sure the audience understands sort of the problem. The other interesting thing is we were working on Alara,

but at least my memory is the incident that spurred this was not Time Spiral, but was in fact Lorwyn Block. In fact, Morning Tide to be exact. We were at the employee pre-release for Morning Tide.

Oh, I have the story, yes. You remember? Okay. So, for the audience, real quick. So what Lorwyn did, Lorwyn was a tribal set in which there were eight tribes. There was, like, goblins and elves and giants and treefolk. We had eight different tribes. And then in Morning Tide, and this was all

my doing, by the way. I'll take full responsibility for this. We played up five classes. So, like, soldier and Wizard. So in the Morning Tide pre-release, half your cards cared about the first creature type on the card, and half of them cared about the second

creature type on your card. So to call it complex, it was complex. So go ahead. Give the story from your... Yeah, you're right. And it was those years where we were not fearing the complexity enough. And you're right, you know it was those years right where we were we were not fearing the complexity enough and you're right laura was the bigger one and we also in addition to having the the tribe class combo being so confusing right it was um also just such a high percentage of your cards were in that space right when you open a booster it was very easy to

have what we called essentially lords and champions right cards that would that space right when you open a booster it was very easy to have what we called essentially lords and champions right cards that would reference tribes right like maybe this one helps every elf and this one helps one specific elf or wants you to cast one specific elf uh lords and champions were just saturating every booster pack so you couldn't get away from it right it was just so loud and like you're saying very complex and we went to a we went to pre-releases for this and i'm actually thinking of the time spiral year as well yeah but we have people who've been playing magic for years and years and years friend of ours rob you know and other people that are just their minds are blown right they're they're trying to play and they're like i don't understand what's

going on what is this set and it was this moment of like okay this is kind of our first test and uh-oh we've made a mistake and it's starting to set in we've gone way too high if somebody is into magic as these people uh don't know what's going on we kind of made a set a way to say this we made it for ourselves too much well so so um okay you are correct that this problem was both stretched over time spiral and lorwyn i think time spiral did it more on the constructed end and Lorwyn did a little more in the limited end. But so let me sort of,

I wanted to sort of define something that's important to understand is, we used to, there's some metrics. We at Wizards, we have metrics. Like, how do we know if a set's doing well? And our two biggest metrics were sales and play. Are people buying the set? Are people buying the set? Are people playing the set?

And for years, sales and play were lockstep. Like if sales were good, play was good. If sales were bad, play was bad. And it just felt like they were reflections of one another, right? And then along comes time spiral block. And play was still good, but sales was tanking. And we're like, what's going on? Why are people playing the product but not buying the product?

They didn't make any sense to us. Yeah. And a key piece here is when we're measuring play, we're measuring what Bill Rose likes to call the tip of the iceberg. This is not representative of everybody. These are people who go to Friday Night Magic, play in tournaments, etc., etc. So we're seeing that more hardcore Magic player enjoying the set This is not representative of everybody. These are people who go to Friday Night Magic, play in tournaments, et cetera, et cetera. So we're seeing that more hardcore Magic player enjoying the set because it truly was.

That is kind of a takeaway is we made time for people like us. So people like us go to Friday Night Magic, right? And they're enjoying it. But sales are tanking or going down. And it's the first time, like you said, those two graphs broke. They had never broken before where play is up, actually, and sales are down. And it made us rethink it a lot. And then, of course, Lorwyn did it in a different way. Right.

So what we at the time realized was we called them the invisibles, as we called it at the time. And what that meant was our data, and I'm also talking about back then. So, I mean, our data is a little bit better than it was back then. But our data at the time, we really only saw the players who talked to us, who went to sanctioned events. Like, we did have a lot of data,

but it was not all of Magic players. It was a subsection of Magic players. And what we realized from what Time Spiral taught us was we were not seeing, not only were we not seeing Magic players, but the majority, the vast majority of Magic players. Which had been talked about, right? We knew that the Invisibles were super important.

We knew that they played differently. We call them sometimes kitchen top Magic players, right? But this really made it hit home, right? That we were, that they exist, they're in larger numbers than us, and we weren't serving them well. It's so funny. I remember Bill Rose, kind of the boss of everybody in R&D at the time,

I assume it's still true. Still true. Yeah, he got us cake to celebrate Time Spiral's release, right? Pre-release events, tournaments are happening, people are loving it, we're hearing good stuff, and then we get their numbers on sales, and he's like, I'm never giving you guys cake again. Yeah, the first two times, yeah. right so and so one of the the big things i mean the one of the reasons i wanted to talk about this is it's really interesting to look at problems and figure out how we solve the problems like a

lot of game design is is problem solving um and so we were faced with this thing of, okay, what is going on here? And, but, I mean, but you and I sort of, like, so the story of New World Order is, you and I go to this pre-release, and I think we had been noodling in the head, but I, I don't know whether we went to lunch, or, like, you and I were chatting

somewhere, we were just the two of us, and we were sort of, like, bemoaning, like, we don't want to not, like, there's an audience that really likes the complication. We don't want to not have depth of play for the audience that really wants really deep, you know, play. But also, we're like,

well, but that's not what our audience needs. So how can we, I mean, like, this is the ongoing magic problem. It's not one audience. It's not really one game. How do we provide for everybody when they're just, they need different things? Yeah. And I love to look at examples where we succeeded with that audience, right?

And I forget exactly how our discussions went, but I think two good sets to point to that came before these years, before the Lorwyn and Timesporal years, is Onslaught, and also a travel set like Lorwyn, and Ravnica. And looking at that and seeing that we believe those sets did well for this kitchen top

magic player. Well, yeah, so it's funny. You said Onslaught. I was going to say Legions. Yeah, which is even better. Right. So Legions, for those, real quickly, Phil, I mean, Matt and I know this, but I need to fill in for the audience. Legions was a small set where there was a gimmick, and the gimmick was

every card in the set's a creature. 100% creatures. Now, the set overall was a little low on power level, and so the enfranchised player base didn't like it. Generally, the vibe when you talk to the enfranchised player base didn't like it. Like, generally the,

you know, the vibe when you talk to the enfranchised players was it was a bad set. But it sold like hotcakes. Yes. And when I first started working,

I was told that it was the best selling small set of all time for Magic. It was. And for a while, I mean, it's since been passed.

But for a while, for years it was. And once again, it was kind of, it was the, before Time Sparrow happened, it was since been passed. But for years it was. And it was kind of... It was the... Before Time Sparrow happened, it was the one other piece of evidence we hadn't quite pieced out.

And when you put it together, it started, oh, oh, I see what's going on. And that was the opposite problem, right? Legion was... Literally the opposite. Yeah. Right. The franchise players weren't that interested,

but the kitchen table magic loved it. I get 15 creatures. That's great. Right. And those rare slivers that were hot, right? Like people were trading for those at a very high level, even though they weren't in tournament decks. That was really interesting to us, right? Like, hey, it's not because people are trying to win a pro tour.

They just really enjoy these cards, right? And that's part of why I think those sets sold so well is, you know, mechanics like slivers is so good. Tribal is so good for the kitchen top player. But that doesn't explain why Lorwyn did so badly, you know, and Time Spiral more so for that audience. But it's interesting to look back and go, OK, so what did we do right? Or what did people that came before me do right in these sets that we're doing so wrong? I think it's super interesting to look at Ravnica when we're building, making the mistake slash natural uh you know game designer uh path of like making it for ourselves ravnica is so interesting to have like oh what if i play three colors what if i play two colors what if i

play four colors so much of the depth was natural in having casting costs that require different mana base different risk level etc super interesting to the enfranchised player. And we didn't have to put so many mechanics at common, et cetera, to make it interesting to us. So we kind of naturally made it for the kitchen top player, I think. Well, and there's another important lesson, I think, from Ravnica, which is sort of the loud strategy. Like, Ravnica very loudly says play two-caller.

And the idea of play more than two-caller, play three-caller, play four-caller, was there, but it wasn't the loudest message. And it was a really important lesson of the loudest message has to be for your most casual player. Right. And for the average player that is not an enfranchised player that just, you know, hey, it's the

two-collar set, play a two-collar guild. Oh, great! One of the things we've learned about sort of the more casual audience, and the word casual is loaded, but in this case I mean less enfranchised. What we've learned about the casual audience is they like loud messages, right?

They like sets that tell them what to do. Legions was fun because it was about creatures. It was hard to miss. Every card in your pack was a creature. You got that. Ravnica, you didn't miss the guilds. The guilds were as loud as possible. Yes.

Which makes me laugh. It makes me laugh that they had to add on the guild, like, what was it? Ravnica City of Guilds? Because Brady and I kept saying, don that they had to add on the guild, like, what was it, Ravniveth City of Guilds? Because Brady and I kept saying, don't worry, they'll get the guilds. And then Brady and I are on vacation and they add City of Guilds because like, no one's going to get it.

And I'm like, anyway, so people did get the guild. People did get it. What do you know? Surprise, surprise, yeah. Yeah, and so much of the skill, I think, and the things that just, not only was I not good at back then, but it didn't even occur to me, is how do you build depth that is discoverable and not, you know,

puzzles you're trying to push in front of people's faces, right? Right. It's been a mistake that I think Future Sight made, is we had so much interesting, like, oh, how does this play? What does it mean to have these two keywords on one card, which was interesting, right? But it's not the way to find hidden depth which is so good if you can find an amazing set which i think ramekin is one of the best ever yeah and adding hidden depth then you win doubly right because you can go okay well now we're gonna be able to focus at common and uh thematically for that casual slash less than franchise player and still win with the people that are you know hardcore gonna play 40 hours a week people

right another lesson real quickly is in some ways, Future Sight was kind of Modern Horizons before Modern Horizons. Oh, okay, sure. I think what Modern Horizons has become is, hey, there's this enfranchised audience that loves crazy complex things, and it's a small portion of the audience,

but it's a very diehard portion, and we can make a product for them. Just the premiere set is not where we're supposed to do that. We can make a product for them and they can, they can have fun. Like Modern Horizons, you know, like you and I, like I love Modern Horizons. Yes, there's 8,000 mechanics and whatever, but like, I know them because I've been playing magic forever, you know? Right.

And it's fun to see them come together and like, what does it mean to be in a set? Like we had fun with it. It was for us, like we were saying. And then, so as we, what's interesting is as we were saying, okay, what does it mean to be in a set like we had fun with it it was for us like we were saying and then so as we what's interesting is as we were saying okay what does it mean what do we do right as we're kind of feeling the pain of yeah making these mistakes and we're working on alara like you said it was more focused on zendikar right we did do some of these new philosophies in alara but zendikar is the first set where we said yep this gets the stamp of new world order applies to this set. Right, so this is my memory, and jump in,

because, so the problem we were trying to solve, so this was the problem before us. How do we make the game simpler, or, you know, less complex for the less enfranchised player, but allow the more enfranchised player to be

engaged, right? And we had this, my memory was we were at lunch. I don't, I mean, you and I were talking. I remember being in one of the art rooms. Oh, maybe it was in a meeting room. I don't know where it was. I remember this moment. I don't remember exactly where it was.

Is you and I figured out that the secret was commons. Yes. Because what is the difference between a more casual player and a more enfranchised player? And that was the casual player tends to buy less overall packs than the enfranchised player. And what we realized

was that the complexity of commons determines a lot about how complex something is because when you open up a booster pack, you know, of your 15 cards, 10 of them are common, right? And, like, one's a land. But, you know, only four of the cards

are uncommons and rares. 10 of them are commons. And that's two-thirds the booster pack. And the big epiphany you and I had, I remember we figured this out, we were just very excited about it, was that it was all about commons. That if you could control the complexity of common,

you really went a far, far way to controlling the complexity in a pack. And the idea was for the more franchise-advanced players, look, they're going to have the uncommons and the rares, they're going to just buy more packs. You know, we're not, it's not that we're not letting them have the fun they want to have.

It's just like, oh, we need to be careful about this one section of cards, which is the commons. Right. And it's funny. It was an important epiphany, right? It was very important, I think. Yeah.

It's also funny to say that, you know, we discovered it because I think if you look back at Alpha, it was already in, you know, like the Su because I think if you look back at alpha, it was already in, you know, like the Subin doppelganger was a rare for a reason. And my commons were much simpler back then, except for the outliers,

of course. I mean, I will say early magic had some complicated commons, but yes, no. Yeah. I mean, alpha in general,

alpha in general was better. Alpha specifically, like even the next few years is not nearly as true. It's fun to look at Ice Age comments, which is three years later, I guess. They are hilarious, more complex than you would make a Rare today, which is really funny.

Yeah, there's an Ice Age comment that has like 12 lines of text on it. And you're like, what? What does this do? And also for no value. Right, right, right. Here's a lot of text. It doesn't really do anything.

Right, it's like you can mess with circles of protection. No, that's a whole card. But they get a timer and they're going to blow up later. That's a comment. Yes, that's a comment. Wow. Yeah, but we liked it actually. Right, so okay, so what happened was,

so the first big epiphany you and I had was that it was all about comments. That like really setting complexity from a pack level, right? Our whole issue is when you open up a single booster pack, how complicated is it? And we realized, okay, it's really about

if we can control the complexity at common, we can control the overall complexity of a pack, not of a set, because if you're going to open all the cards, you get on commons and rares and later mythic rares. Mythic rares, I don't think, were a thing yet, because Shards of Alara premiered mythic rares. Yeah, Olara was first.

Anyway, so you and I said, okay, how do we keep commons from being too complex? Right. And this was tough, right? Because first of all, this message to us internally is a tough message. Like, hey, we need to quote unquote dumb down the game. It's not anything the players want to hear or any of us in R&D want to hear. So, hey, we need to, quote unquote, dumb down the game. It's not anything the players want to hear or any of us in R&D want to hear. So what do we specifically need, right? And so one of the poster children for this was Samhite Healer, right?

Frequently a common in a core set, right? Tons of versions of that have been printed over and over. But what does it do inside of a game, right? And what could go wrong with Samhite Healer for people to just know? It prevents one damage to anything. So it taps, it's a two cost's a it prevents one damage to anything so it taps it's a two cost one one prevent one damage to anything and it adds tons of complexity right

because what are the different ways right if you just look at it like how can combat play out when I attack with two or three creatures and they have two or three potential blockers it's humongous right and tons of your attacks become terrible right it's not only does it create complexity and how combat can resolve but also if you do it wrong, it's very punishing, right? We call these onboard tricks, right? And that is a great example of incredibly complex, should not be at common. And when we presented this to the team, it was like,

are you kidding me? Samhite's been at common forever. Magic's the best game on the planet. How could this possibly be true that Samite is wrong? Yeah, one of the things that I remember one of the things we talked about was this idea of thinking of brain power.

How hard is your brain working? Imagine a little RPM on a car, right? How much are you revving your brain? And the thing we were really trying to explain to people is this car makes you really, really rev your brain. Like, commons shouldn't rev you that hard. And the thing we were really trying to explain to people is, this card makes you really, really rev your brain. Like, commons shouldn't rev you that hard. And that Samite Healer

is a good example in that it's not that it does one thing, it really changes the dynamic of how combat works in a way that just makes you do lots and lots of math, really. And I remember the way we demonstrated it is, we made a board

and I think we put like four creatures in each side and said, okay, let's take off, let's take away the Samhite Healer. Okay, what decisions are there? What are you doing? And we walked through what you're making. And then we added the Samhite Healer and said, okay, now what decisions are you making? And it was like five times as many

decisions because all of a sudden anything you did had a variable that it didn't have before. Right. It's so many so that even though R&D at the time was full of pros, I'm sure it is still today, it was actually a hard problem. It's not just I have to spend time, right?

Like you're talking about what we call, Robert Gautier coined the concentration points concept. But also it was incredibly hard. So you're like repeating and you still make mistakes. And to me, that was a big piece of it. Are commons making the game so hard that the punishing feeling is too high? What if I choose not to go through all the permutations

of what combat could be? Well, I just keep losing. First Strike does this to a degree as well. Where it's like, if I'm not reading cards and I'm not paying enough attention, what can go wrong? Sandbite Healer is, your 3-3 dies and mine doesn't. Are you done? Put your guy in the graveyard. You've got no value for that attack. And it's just so embarrassing and painful. And it tells you, you better be reading all my cards because I could punish you

if you don't, even at common. Right. Another dynamic you hit upon that's interesting to talk about is one of the things we find when there's too much to talk about is one of the things we find when you when there's too much to think about a lot of players, what they do is they go I'm not going to think about it. It's too much for me. And so what they do is they just make actions, right?

And the problem is if they make actions and get horribly punished it discourages aggression. It discourages them doing things, right? If the one time I said, ah, I don't know, whatever, I'll attack, and I get destroyed, I learn, oh, I guess if I don't know, I shouldn't attack. Right? And then, it just

makes the game, it just causes all sorts of problems for the game, because right, people aren't ending the game, you know, and so a big part of the New World Order was, so we came up with this concept we called Red Flags. And what a red flag meant is if this is true you should think twice about whether it's supposed to be a common

not that it couldn't be there but what we were saying is hey you should never put this at common without acknowledging that you're putting in a common exactly and that was so important too right because we didn't want to take away the potential for fun and for synergies at common, et cetera, et cetera, right? And sometimes you need to pay the quote unquote price of complexity to make a set awesome, right? Because draft and people aren't buying tons of what we were kind of proposing how we view commons in the future. And so identifying it, understanding it, and then being aware of it in our sets going forward was what we wanted to communicate to the team. Right. And a big model of it was we called it the 80-20 thing, where what we're saying is 20% of your commons get to do things. is 20% of your commons get to do things, but 80% should be simple.

I mean, simple in the sense that they're not causing the revving we're talking about, right? There's a lot of cards. I mean, the thing to remember is even a vanilla creature can make interesting situations happen. It's not as if a 3-3, it's boring. There's lots of, like, you know, what do I do?

And they have this and that. I remember I taught people how to play Portal. as if a 3-3, it's boring. There's lots of, like, you know, what do I do? And they have this and that, you know. I remember I taught people how to play Portal. It's a version of Magic we made long ago. And Portal has, like, creatures and sorceries and land. I think that was it. That was the only creature context. And you guys came up with the idea of sorceries that I could play during my opponent's turn.

That was pretty smart. That was cool. Well, we did that, I think, on Counterspell. But anyway, I was teaching people. And so when we weren't teaching people, we would just play ourselves. And it was really like how much fun Portal could be. And like, it was the simplest version of it. But like, combat can be complex, even just mostly vanilla creatures.

Yeah. A 2-4 is interesting, right? How does it double block, right? What are the risks if they have a giant growth, et cetera, et cetera? And just, you know, in the simple mechanics that don't cause onboard complexity, right? One of the cards I tried to draft in the new set says, whenever you play an artifact, put a plus one, plus one counter on me, right? These are the types of things that could be a common,

and we don't necessarily call them a red flag, right? Because it's, you know, it's growing and it's not, you know, it's a different size, but it's not like, oh, I got to think about this and how it's going to interact with these nine things. It's, hey, it's not, you know, it's a different size, but it's not like, oh, I've got to think about this and how it's going to interact with these nine things. It's, hey, it's a creature that grows, right? And that can have tons of depth and how do I build my deck and when do I play what? How does it grow before I put it at risk, et cetera, et cetera.

There's tons of depth there still. That was the software trick. It was a big part of what we were talking about when we were trying to explain this to R&D is that we're not trying to explain this to r&d is that it's we're not trying to strip interesting things from happening right what we were trying to take away is what is creating these your rev your brain moments that make things much harder and let's and another big thing about the the 2080 thing is what we said is if your set's going to do

something that's fine but make it that that's what the set's doing. Like in Zendikar, as a good example, hey, caring about when you play a land is making you care about something you don't normally care about. But Zendikar said, well, that's the thing. We're going to make you care about one thing you don't normally care about, but that's the one thing you have to care about. That's a great example,

because sometimes I would hold a land in that format, right? Because who knows, I might draw a landfall character uh creature later and i might have nine of those on my deck if there was one at uncommon in a random set well now i'm forgetting and it's like adding complexity in a different way right uh and another piece that we we uh i think was a good argument for this is everybody who plays magic kind of has their limit we were kind of talking about this when you start to check out when you're revving too many of these concentration points up.

Yeah. We're saying we make magic so complex in some of these sets that even the pros are reaching their limit, right? Like if I can pay attention to 17 things and somebody else can pay attention to 19 and somebody else wants to pay attention to six, well, we got 23 things going on.

We're not making this for anybody, right? We got some of the best, Mike Turian was on the team, right? Like, we got some of the best limited players of all time as a part of our play test. If nobody's having fun with the 23, why are we going above, right? Why are we doing these complex, got to pay attention to so much stuff? So we were arguing basically we had plenty of room to move down and still have a full complex game going on. Interesting game going on. Even if we divided it in half, we thought.

And another thing we were stressing was things that make you think solely for just to make you think aren't inherently fun. You know what I'm saying? And that, like, one of the things we were talking about is, like, you know, imagine I have a card that says, you know, every time I attack, you and I go play a game of chess,

and then the winner, you know, if I win the game of chess, then I get a boost on my creature, and I'm like, you know, like, you can have things that have lots of complexity, but that doesn't make it necessarily a more fun thing, you know, and that a lot of what we were trying to say is, there are things that are

fun, that add value, we just want to say is there are things that are fun that add value. We just want to make sure that our complexity, like here's an analogy. When you talk about fats, they always say there's good fats and bad fats, right? Like there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. And that we want the fun to be the good cholesterol, right? We want the cards like saying the things that are adding complexity need to be the good cholesterol, right? We want the cards, like, saying the things that are adding complexity need to be fun. It's not that you can't add complexity, but make sure you're maximizing

the fun on the cards that come in that are complex, and not just brain-revving for the sake of brain-revving, you know what I'm saying? Not like I have to make this very complicated puzzle I have to solve just to do it. You know, it's more like, oh, right. Oh, if I hold this land in my hand, then maybe later I can play it, and like, it's more like, oh, right. Oh, if I hold this land in my hand,

then maybe later I can play it. It's those fun moments where I think, oh, like, one of the things that's awesome about Magic is when you are playing a game, you go, you know what? Normally I do this, but in this environment, I'm not supposed to do that. That's a great moment, right? Yes.

And a lot of this, too, is making me think of around the same time, I'm forgetting the exact timeline, but the, you know, the huge heated debates we have with all the M10 rules changes. A lot of them were kind of targeted in the same space. What do we have that's just complexity, you know it if you know it type of rules, right? That don't add to the fun, right? That don't actually add to depth, like, there's nothing, etc. Right. Yeah, I mean, like, I know mana burn's one of the things that, like, here's something to care about that doesn't matter most of the time, but because it can matter, I feel obligated. Like, that's a real good area of problems where

it's like, there's a 1-2% chance this means something, so I feel like, one of the reasons, for example, we now, most of the time you put cards on the bottom of the library we make it random it's because it like it's not going to matter in almost every single game but like because it could matter you feel obligated to like maximize and we're like it's just not worth the brain energy so we're not going to make you think and where's the fun right i think there could have been some concept of like oh you got too

much man in your pool if things are making multiple mana, but it doesn't even come up much at all. And you never hear anybody be like, oh yeah, I love magic. It's got all these cool dragons and it's got mana burn and... No. I mean, as with anything, and one of the things that you always find out is whenever we remove something, there's somebody who had the deck that

did it. I mean, there's always people that found a way to love whatever part of the game. Every part of the game has somebody who loves it. But as game designers, you have to sort of, where is the best overall? Like, I'm not saying we can't make rares that do crazy things and people can care about them. I'm saying don't put them in common where you're making everybody have to care about them. Right, and that's a great point too, right? When we were first pitching this to the rest of the team, a lot of the argument was,

look, we're not limiting what can happen in magic right the craziest coolest rare that's ever existed could be in zendikar this isn't trying to argue against that at all right and part of it you know part of the argument was actually like hey maybe some of that complexity that we're moving from common moves up in rarity so maybe for the enfranchised player, it's still the same amount overall, but just not at common. Yeah, and so anyway, just sort of, basically what happened was

the larger idea of New World Order was we created a series of red flags, and I have articles that walk through all the red flags and everything. In half an hour, we're not going to hit all the topics here, but basically the system was, at Common, we have things that are red flags, and red flags would be

like, do you have four more lines of text? Are you affecting other permanents on the board? There are a bunch of different things, and we said, hey, if you meet any of these requirements, look at it. It's not saying it can't be at Common, but we had the 80-20 rule, which sort of said, look, 80% of your cards shouldn't be problematic,

20% can be. And then even in the 20%, we're like, look, concentrate what you're making people think about. You know, figure out what's the main thing you care about. And it's fine that the set makes you care about something new, but don't make every card be a different new thing. You know, at common especially, concentrate where it is. You know, and the funny thing is R&D was, it took a little while to get them on board, but once we really got them to understand it, you know, they were

quite excited. I mean, they did, once they saw it, everybody did get on board eventually, and R&D was very much a fan of Noodle Dome. Yeah, and I remember us talking about that, like, let's play this, you know, because we don't think that people are really going to notice a massive difference right like

when we make a set and draft it and i forget exactly how we rolled that out but i think it's right in line with what you're saying is we drafted sets that had this 80 20 rule in common and they're still super fun i mean i think zendikar is super fun yeah you guys would go on i left but you guys would go on to make my favorite limited format of all time a year or two later with flip cards and all these cool mechanics that were very defined to the set, but also it followed New World Order. Yeah, and that was, I mean, the reason I wanted to talk about it today is a lot of time I talk about like making individual sets, but another big part of our job is not just the sets themselves, but the larger structure. You know, how do we make sets? How do we think about sets? Like, what are the guidelines? And, I mean, this is just talking about one aspect, but there are many, many things that when we make a set, we have to think about. And New World Order was just an easy way to think about how

complexity works in Asfan. Asfan as fans for as fans how many cards are in the booster of a particular quality um and that was like that was a lot of us really saying hey let's be more conscious about how often something happens and where it happens and what it's asking the player to do yeah and i find it so fun to to go through this right because it didn't occur to us in the way that it did then in years earlier, right? Like, it was right under our nose that we should have been paying attention to this. That's what's so fun about being a game designer. It's like, okay, where's there room for improvement that maybe hasn't occurred to us?

Maybe nobody's talked about yet. But if we, you know, if we dive into it, we can find ways to improve a game, even like Magic, that's, you know, approaching 30 years now, which is just totally crazy. like magic that's you know approaching 30 years now it's just totally crazy and one of the interesting things for me i mean as the person who's been through this for most of it is we keep innovating we keep coming up with new ideas and new things and like it's amazing when somebody will come up with something like i remember when um eric lauer suggested the idea that couldn't we just draft the blocks backwards so like the you draft the newest thing and like we just had never thought of that but as soon as he said it we're like how why are we not doing it that

way you know and it's it is crazy after 30 years how stuff like that comes up like how in 30 years do we not come up with something you know especially the things that in hindsight seem so obvious like one of the things I always joke about

was I was on Mirage and one of my big innovations, oh, I'm sorry, what's Mirage? No, no, it was on Tempest. One of my big innovations on Tempest was taking the common expel

and adding two red mana so it was harder to splash. Nice. Like, I never thought, maybe the common isn't where the expel is supposed to be. Yeah, well well good news Mark

it was still a bomb and I'm glad you brought up the pro tour that I won thank you yes it was it was still a bomb it was still a bomb it was

it was anyway the but yeah I I can see here I can see my desk so I'm almost to work but I

hopefully the thing I'm hoping the audience enjoyed today is like it's really fun to get into the crunchy you you know, the crunchy stuff of a set. But I also wanted them to see, like, a lot of making cards is the meta structure, not just an individual set. And this is you and I, like, this was a fun moment for you and I where we sort of innovated on something. And we came up with something that, like, right, looking back, like, how did we not get this before this?

But we didn't, so. Embarrassing. At least you and I figured it out. So at least we go, oh, okay, we figured it out. Maybe we should have figured it out years earlier. But we did figure it out eventually, so. I think so. But anyway, guys, I can see my desk.

So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you, Matt, for being with us today. Thank you. And it's always, I mean, I have a blast talking to you all the time, but it's fun having you on and just talking about magic things. So that's a lot of fun.

So fun. So anyway, thanks, Matt. And to everybody else, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.